Harmony in Hierarchy: Understanding Confucian Influences on East Asian Parenting Techniques

A Korean-Australian friend of mine in Melbourne — second-generation, primary-school-age kids, the kind of mum who quietly does three things at once at the school gate while the rest of us catch up — said to me, in passing, that her own mother had stopped speaking to her for a week the year she moved her daughter out of the local hagwon. The fight was not about the hagwon. It was about tiger parenting in the older, deeper sense, and about what the hagwon meant inside it: in her mother's reading, deciding her granddaughter did not need the cram-school evenings was a quiet rejection of the family's investment in the next generation, the kind of investment her mother had made in her, and her grandmother in her mother, back through a line of women that the word filial piety — xiào (孝) — has been trying to describe for two and a half thousand years. The word in English for what the Australian parenting magazines would have called my friend's mother's posture is tiger parenting. The word in Confucian is much older, much more capacious, and considerably more interesting than the magazine label suggests.

I am writing this piece partly because the magazine label has begun to wear thin. The largest empirical study ever done of the parenting profile Amy Chua named — Su Yeong Kim's eight-year longitudinal work with 444 Chinese-American families, published in 2013 — found that only 27.8 per cent of mothers and 18.6 per cent of fathers in the sample actually fit the tiger profile when scored across the eight relevant dimensions (Kim et al., 2013, PMC). The modal profile in the same sample was supportive — high warmth combined with high structure — at 45.0 per cent of mothers and 63.4 per cent of fathers. And on every outcome Kim and her colleagues measured — grade point average, depressive symptoms, parent-child alienation, sense of family obligation — supportive parenting outperformed tiger parenting. Tiger parenting did produce significantly higher academic pressure than easygoing parenting, which is the part of the script that survived into the meme; what it did not produce was better academic results, better mental-health outcomes, or a closer family. That is the part the meme dropped. The article below tries to put it back in.

What filial piety actually is

The root of the whole conversation is a Confucian principle that has been carried, with significant variation, across China, Korea, Japan, and the diaspora communities for the better part of two and a half millennia. Xiào (孝) — the character itself depicts a young person carrying an elder — is usually translated into English as "filial piety," and the translation does it a disservice. The simpler shorthand the Analects and the later Classic of Filial Piety both rely on is closer to the long debt children owe to the parents who carried them. The dictionary version has, in many Western readers' heads, hardened into "obedience to elders, full stop." The dictionary version is not what the contemporary scholarly work says it is.

A 2025 Current Directions in Psychological Science paper by Yena Kyeong, Meryl Yu, Henning Tiemeier, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, and Peipei Setoh (Kyeong et al., 2025, SAGE) explicitly dismantles three of the misconceptions the Western reading carries: that filial piety is unwavering obedience to parents; that it exists only in Asian cultures; and that it concerns only the care of older adult parents. Their integrative framework names three dimensions — beliefs and values, affect, and behaviours — that evolve across historical time and across the developmental stage of the child. A second-generation Chinese-Australian teenager negotiating which subjects to take in Year 11 is doing filial piety as much as a Korean great-grandmother sitting next to her in the front room: the beliefs, the felt loyalty, and the daily behaviours have all moved with her, and the simpler caricature of "obedient child of strict parent" is the part the contemporary research has been steadily updating away from.

The genealogy of the practice is worth naming, because nobody in the magazines bothers to. Mencius's mother, Zhang Shi, moved the family three times to find the right environment for her son's education. That story is preserved in the Han-dynasty Liènǚ zhuàn and is widely read in classical Chinese schools to this day; it is, depending on how you count, the world's oldest written instance of the "I will do anything for my child's education" impulse that the magazines now attribute to Amy Chua. The Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, the Song-dynasty Neo-Confucian household codes, the colonial-era reformist debates over what xiào should mean in a modern state — the practice has been argued over inside the cultures that built it for as long as it has existed. What the West has done in the last twenty years is invent a stick-figure version of one branch of it and then debate the stick figure.

The Chua–Kim–Chao debate, briefly

Amy Chua's 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin) is the cultural artefact most American readers reach for when they reach for this topic. Chua's book — half memoir, half thesis — described a parenting style centred on academic high-achievement, refusal of mediocrity, and a willingness to use shame and pressure as instruments of love. The book was, and remains, divisive in exactly the way it was designed to be.

Su Yeong Kim's 2013 paper at the University of Texas at Austin was the first serious empirical test of Chua's central claim — that her style produced superior outcomes — at scale and over time. The findings, which I have already named in the opening paragraphs of this essay and which deserve to be repeated, were that the tiger profile was a minority practice (27.8 per cent of mothers) and that on every measured outcome the supportive profile (45.0 per cent of mothers) did better. Kim's data did not say that high standards are bad. It said that high standards delivered through shaming and emotional withdrawal produce worse academic and mental-health outcomes than high standards delivered through warmth and structure. That distinction is the part that did not make it into the cultural meme.

The methodological backstop for both is Ruth Chao's 1994 paper in Child Development, which I would consider the single most important methodological note in this literature. Chao's point was that Western parenting scales — the Baumrind authoritative-vs-authoritarian split most psychologists were trained on — were miscalibrated when applied to Chinese-American families. Chao introduced the concept of training (guǎn) — high control paired with high warmth and parental sacrifice — and argued that it sat in a different conceptual space than the Western "authoritarian" cell, which carries a coldness and distance that guǎn does not carry. Chao's data showed that Chinese-American adolescents whose parents looked "authoritarian" on the Western scale actually outperformed peers whose parents looked "authoritative" on the same scale, because the scale was reading East Asian training as Western authoritarianism. Kim's 2013 work, properly read, is the empirical extension of Chao's methodological one: it operationalises the supportive profile that Chao predicted would emerge once the scale was recalibrated.

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China: the gaokao and the 双减 reform

The Chinese version of the practice now sits inside the gravitational field of the gaokao — the national college entrance examination that has shaped Chinese parental investment since the late 1970s and that still functions, in most provinces, as the single most consequential day in a young person's life. The Confucian inheritance the gaokao sits on top of is precisely the xiào commitment to family advancement through the next generation's scholarship. The system the gaokao generated, in the 2000s and 2010s, was a private-tutoring market that grew to enormous scale, with families investing significant fractions of household income in evening and weekend academic supplementation.

In July 2021, Beijing introduced the shuāng jiǎn (双减) — the "double reduction" — policy: a sweeping restriction on for-profit, subject-based tutoring institutions. By 2024, subject-based tutoring institutions had fallen from approximately 124,000 to approximately 9,000; 75 per cent of urban schools were running after-school programs; parent satisfaction with the policy ran at 97.3 per cent; and a 2025 study linked the reform to a 7 to 8 per cent rise in expected total fertility rate as households reallocated spending and time (EurekAlert / Chinese MoE, 2025). The reform was a real policy, with measurable effects.

It also did not abolish the underlying script. A 2024 Journal of Family Studies paper, "The Involution of Middle-Class Tiger Moms" (Taylor & Francis, 2024), tracked how the gaokao race and the double-reduction restrictions interact inside urban middle-class households in a coastal Chinese city, and found that the tiger-mother archetype is intensifying rather than relaxing among that cohort, even as the policy reduces the obvious tutoring infrastructure. The investment is shifting — into art, music, coding, sport, "non-academic" credentialing — but the underlying parental drive is the same drive Mencius's mother demonstrated twenty-four centuries ago. The script does not yield to a single policy. It re-routes.

Korea: hagwon, depression claims, and the 2024 crackdown

The Korean version of the practice runs through the hagwon — private cram schools and academies — and through a Korean concept that the dictionary version of xiào under-translates: jeong, the relational closeness that holds the parent-child obligation in the body rather than only in the rule. Korea's hagwon culture became, in the 2010s, one of the most intensive private-education systems in the world: by the late teens, it was common for Seoul children to be in academic instruction until ten or eleven o'clock at night, six days a week, from primary school onward.

In July 2024, the Korean Ministry of Education banned hagwon advertising of pre-curriculum — multi-grade-ahead — instruction, identifying 130 violation cases under Article 8 of the 2014 Special Act and threatening first-time fines (Asia News Network, 2024). The number that drove the crackdown is the one I find hardest to read without flinching: in affluent Seoul districts, health-insurance claims for depression and anxiety among children under nine more than tripled, from 1,037 in 2020 to 3,309 in 2024 (Korea Times, August 2025). A 2025 National Human Rights Commission letter is now pushing legislation to ban hagwon English and subject instruction for children under thirty-six months entirely, and to cap pre-elementary instruction at forty minutes per day. The country is, in other words, internally reforming the practice it built, in response to the mental-health cost the practice generated. The culture is not in denial about what its own intensity has done to its small children.

Japan: juku, amae, and gaman

The Japanese version of the practice has, in the way of Japanese cultural life, evolved more quietly. The juku — Japanese cram schools — exist, and they function broadly the way the Korean hagwon and Chinese tutoring institutions do, although usually less aggressively. What is different is the conceptual frame the practice sits inside. Two Japanese concepts that do not translate cleanly into English, amae and gaman, do most of the work. Amae, made famous by the psychiatrist Takeo Doi's 1971 work, names the indulgent closeness — the right to be passively dependent on a trusted adult — that Japanese parenting cultivates between mother and young child and that runs through adult life as a continuing relational expectation. Gaman names the endurance, the patient bearing of difficulty without complaint, that the same culture asks of the child and the adult later. The two concepts do not contradict each other. They coexist as two halves of the same emotional vocabulary: the close belonging on one side, the disciplined patience on the other, the xiào obligation running underneath both. The juku is the visible institution. The deeper instruction is in the daily emotional life of the household.

Asian-American diaspora: the second-generation shift

The cohort the contemporary American conversation about tiger parenting most needs to hear from is the second-generation Asian-American parent cohort: the children who were raised inside the script and are now, in their thirties and forties, raising children of their own. NBC News reported extensively on this shift in 2024 (NBC News, 2024). The shift the journalism documents is real and structural: a meaningful share of second-generation Asian-American parents are explicitly rejecting the more authoritarian inflection of their own upbringing in favour of what the broader contemporary American discourse calls gentle parenting — empathy, positive discipline, mutual respect over command. The driver, as told in the first-person accounts, is partly the mental-health cost they carry from their own childhoods: anxiety, perfectionism, parent-child estrangement, the felt distance between achievement and connection. Xiào is not being abandoned, in those accounts. The enforcement mechanism is being put down.

What this generation is, in effect, doing — without always naming it as such — is what Kim's 2013 data already supported: moving from the tiger profile to the supportive profile. The cultural inheritance survives. The instruments of love change.

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What survives the meme

The Korean-Australian friend I opened this essay with has not, in case you are wondering, fallen out permanently with her mother. They speak now. The granddaughter is not in the hagwon. The investment her mother wanted her to make in her own daughter is being made, just differently — in time, in attention, in the kind of structured warmth Kim's data suggests is the version of the practice that actually delivers what its proponents have always claimed it does. The Confucian inheritance is intact. The xiào is still there. The instrument has changed, and the family has, in the way families do when they are paying attention, eventually noticed that the change is real and that the granddaughter is, by every measure either grandmother or mother would have understood, doing fine. The practice was always larger than the meme. The meme is what travelled. The practice, in its better and more humane forms, is what is left.